The Local Kids — Issue 1 — Summer 2018

“The Local Kids” — A compilation of texts, a contribution to a correspondence between those who desire anarchy and subversion.

The year is 2018. Our living environment is increasingly interconnected and transparent. This is obvious for the digital reality but is also true for the physical – if the distinction between the two hasn’t already become too artificial. These tendencies have reinforced the validation of the self through affiliation to a group and subjugation to its norms. Before our eyes identities are being constructed, clashes erupt in the scramble for a space to carve out and claim. A bonus for its members is that the enforcing of the norms now is horizontally distributed. As society becomes more totalitarian, the main feeling becomes anxiety. Will for one more day our imperfections pass unnoticed, or maybe just tolerated? And while we invest everything in this socially acceptable image of ourselves we have created, we become the role we were only playing. Is this life?

No, it is a defeat, and we should refuse it. To acknowledge the richness of our desires, to explore them, to feel the power in developing them. Nothing will make us repent of the choice for full life, the substance of which is autonomy, individual and collective. So we move towards the subversion of social relations.